We want to thank all of you ahead of time for letting us give this
talk. We have a feeling that, by the end of it, a number of you folks are
going to be quite annoyed with us. At least, we sure hope so. Because
we're going to be preaching against the choir, or at least one section of
it: the section that suggests that skeptics ought not to challenge the
claims of religion. We think that skeptics not only can do so, they should
do so, and the sooner, the better.

Before we begin to support those claims, however, we would like each of
you to ask yourselves if you believe skeptics ought to defend science
against pseudoscience. If you do, stick around and listen. If you don't,
then you might want to leave, because the entire lecture will annoy you,
not just parts of it. So, without further ado, let us begin.

I wish to draw your attention to the following three statements: 1. The
earth is flat. 2. UFO's are piloted by aliens. 3. Evolution doesn't
happen. And I'm going to draw your further attention to them by stating
that they are all true.

Don't agree with me? Well, in fact, they are all true to within a
certain range of probability. Let's take the first statement as an
example. Do you have to worry about taking account of the curvature of the
earth when you're building a house? Do you worry about the floor bowing up
in the center? No? How about when you're building a city? Still no? Within
a range of a few hundred miles or so, the earth is indeed pretty darn
close to flat. If you stop there, and don't look any further, and don't
extend your measurements, the first statement is true. But if you go
beyond that distance, you start to notice some funny curvature. And, if
you go far enough, you go all the way around it and realize that it isn't
flat, it's round, like a ball, or a sphere. And so the earth is round. But
that's only true to a certain range of probability, too. In fact, if you
look a little more closely and measure the roundness of the earth more
carefully, you find that you've neglected to take into account the fact
that the earth's spinning distorts its shape a little bit, bulging it out
at the equator and squashing it a bit at the poles. The earth is not a
perfect sphere, but an oblate spheroid.

And so it's an oblate spheroid -- to within a certain probability. If
you measure yet more carefully, and cover yet more ground, you find that
the earth is in fact a little bit pear-shaped. One hemisphere is a little
fatter than the other. I don't know if it's the northern or the southern
hemisphere that's bigger, and it doesn't really matter. The point is that
the earth is more spherical than flat, more oblate than spherical, more
pear-shaped than oblate. The more careful and complete your observations
are, the less likely it seems to be the world is flat.

And the remaining two questions can be taken care of in the same way.
We all know that UFO's are real -- at least there's a lot of stuff up
there that we don't know what the heck it is. But what argument do we have
against the believer that these UFO's are piloted by little green men? The
same sort of argument that we have against the flat-earthers. The more
careful and complete your observations, the fewer little green men you
see. If you don't look too closely or carefully, every UFO could be
piloted by little green men (or women, or whatever). It's not impossible,
right? But if you look a little more carefully, most UFO's turn out to be
of strictly terrestrial origins. There are a few that are genuinely
extra-terrestrial, though, so there's still hope. But most of those turn
out to be Venus or meteors, and those don't need little green pilots. The
more careful and complete your observations are, the less likely it seems
to be that UFO's are piloted.

Of course, the third statement is true. And here's the proof: here I
am, standing in front of you, not evolving! (I will leave it to you folks
to use my above examples to demolish that argument.)

It is important to mention that no probabilistic argument can be taken
as ironclad, absolute proof. "Very, very unlikely" is not the same as
"never." There is still a vanishingly small possibility that the earth
really is flat, UFO's really do have little green pilots, and evolution is
"just a theory." But it's less and less likely all the time.

It is even more important to mention that there is no reason to expect
ahead of time that any of the above statements are necessarily impossible
-- even though they have been shown, to an ever higher degree of
certainty, to be false. Honest skepticism must begin its examination of
all claims without prejudice, and approach each claim with neutrality as
to its truth or falsity. That is the essence of the open mind.

Of course, that doesn't mean we need to keep our minds so open that our
brains fall out. If the same claim has been repeatedly tested and been
found wanting, there comes a time when it is merely perverse to continue
to believe in it. And so the world is round, the aliens are absent (so
far, anyway), and evolution happens. At some point, properly gathered
evidence, even negative evidence, must be sufficiently compelling to allow
us to discard some claims, at least as a working hypotheses.

How much evidence is enough? Well, you can actually quantify how likely
a claim is, depending on the evidence for or against it. The technique is
called Baysean reasoning. It is in fact a quantitative way of calculating
what most people do informally when deciding whether or not something is
likely, by adding up the evidence for or against a particular claim. The
equation looks like this, and works this way: You have a claim you want
test, and you want to quantify how the test results make the claim either
more or less likely. You start by assuming a neutral probability for the
claim, 50%, which goes here. You then start testing the claim, and that
data for or against the claim goes there. While one positive example can
bring the probability of the claim to one, as more and more evidence is
gathered and continues to be negative, the probability of the claim being
true asymptotically approaches zero. The point is that negative evidence
is not meaningless, and does change the probability of the claim.

One interesting feature of Baysean calculations is that you can put
information from a variety of sources in the equation, including opinions
and "gut feelings." And the evidence you use can be weighted; that is, you
might discount the data from researcher A, for example, if you feel he
does sloppy work, and pay more credence to the claims of researcher B. On
the other hand, someone else might really like researcher A, not care at
all for B, and also like C -- all of which will change the assessment of
the final probability. Two people, looking at the same data, depending on
how they weight each contribution to the calculation, can come up with
opposing conclusions.

Another feature, which will become more important later in the talk, is
that, if you assume at the start that something has a probability of one,
that is, if you assume it is certain, no amount of further information
will change that probability. In other words, if god said it, you believe
it, and that settles it, there is no amount of data that will change your
mind. And you can quantify that, too.

You folks all know the four Laws of Thermodynamics, right? There's the
"zeroth" law of thermal equilibrium, which states that, if you have a hot
object next to a cold object, the cold object will get warmer and the hot
one colder until they reach the same temperature. The first law of
internal energy states that you can't run a machine with more than 100%
efficiency. In other words, you can't get more energy out of a closed
system than there was to begin with and, no matter what path you take. The
second law of work has two ways of stating the same thing: that you can't
build a machine that works with 100% efficiency. The first version states
that you can't take energy from a cold object and put it into a warm
object (as you could with a 100% efficient "reversible" engine); heat
can't flow "uphill." The second version states that you can't build any
machine that will run forever; eventually it has to run down. The third
law of absolute zero states that you can't, in a finite number of steps,
bring any object to absolute zero. If you could, you'd have a perfect heat
sink, and any machine using it would be able to work with 100% efficiency.

A simpler version of these four laws was penned by someone far wiser
and wittier than Norm and me. It goes like this:

zeroth law: Life is a gamefirst law: You can't winsecond law: You
can't break eventhird law: You can't even get out of the game

(Of course, that leaves us with only one choice: play!)

The four laws of thermodynamics have obvious applications in dealing
with crank "engineers" who claim to have built a perpetual motion machine
that "really works this time!" But these four laws can in fact be applied
to all pseudoscientific claims, once you realize, via information theory,
that information requires energy, and that the same constraints that apply
to energy apply to information as well. You can't get more information out
of a closed system than you started with; all information is probabilistic
and degrades with time; and you can't ever have any information that you
know is absolutely true (in other words, metaphorically anyway, you can't
build a perfect "heat sink" for your ignorance). (We don't know about the
zeroth law -- if a smart person sits next to a dumb person, does the smart
person get dumber and the dumb person smarter?)

Knowing the four laws of thermodynamics is vital for evaluating
pseudoscientific claims. When you run pseudoscientific claims to ground
and figure out what they are really saying, you will find they all violate
one or more of these laws, either in terms of energy or in terms of
information. That's why they're called pseudoscience instead of science.
Remote viewing and clairvoyance, for example, attempt to get information
without effort, and violate the first law. Astrology attempts to give you
perfect knowledge of your life, character, and future mate based on the
particular moment you were born, and violates at least the second law and
probably the first and third as well. Alternative healing methods,
therapeutic touch and psychic surgery, for example, claim to use "energy"
that follows no known laws of thermodynamics at all, as it can't be
measured and leaves no trace of its existence, and yet supposedly can be
manipulated by human practitioners. And so on.

My husband and I believe that such a claim not only can be treated the
same as the other three, it must be so treated. But, while it's fairly
obvious how to measure the curvature of the earth, or verify the presence
or absence of little green UFO pilots, or find out whether or not all of
life in this planet is mutually related, this question seems, at first
blush, quite a bit different from the others. Why that is the case we'll
will get to in a moment. First we want to discuss science and something
called the postulate of objectivity, and then give you a quick course in
biochemistry.

Science and skepticism are two different things. Pure skepticism
believes that everything is open to doubt; or, to put it a more positive
way, it begins without prejudice, and doesn't assume anything to be either
true or false at first hearing. Science also begins from that position. It
has to; anything regarded as true or false from the outset can't be
tested.

However, science, unlike pure skepticism, has found it useful to make
one additional assumption, an hypothesis about the nature of the universe.
It is what the late French biochemist Jacques Monod called the postulate
of objectivity -- a tremendously unfortunate name, as it makes it sound as
though the scientists are supposed to be objective about the universe, or
that it's possible in some way for human beings to achieve completely
objective truth. Neither is the case. In fact, what Monod meant was that
the universe itself is assumed to be objective. To put it another way, the
universe is assumed to be telling the truth about itself -- that it's not
trying to pull a fast one, or deceive us, or work one way for certain
people and a different way for others. What you see is what you get; it's
being straight with us.

There are a number of implications that fall out from this working
hypothesis, not the least of which is the realization that, if the
universe is being honest with us, then the only way we can find anything
out about it is to be honest with it. All scientists have to make a
commitment to what Norm and I call the ethic of truth-telling. If you
don't tell the truth, your science is no good.

But there is another implication of this assumption, and it relates to
the nitty-gritty of doing experiments, and we're going to explore this
implication by describing an experiment I frequently did when I worked in
lipid biochemistry. I worked mostly with phospholipids (more properly
called phosphoglycerides). These are large molecules which make up cell
membranes. They have a head end containing a phosphate group and a tail
end containing usually two long lipid chains. The two tails can be any of
a number of different kinds of lipids, and the head end can have a whole
number of different things attached as well, so there were quite a number
of different phospholipids to be found in cell membranes. To sort them all
out, I used two-dimensional thin-layer chromatography using silica gel on
glass plates (I used to make my own TLC plates in those days). You put a
sample in one corner of the plate, run it up with solvents, turn the plate
90 degrees, run it up with a different set of solvents, develop the
resulting "fingerprint" in iodine, which stains the lipids, then
laboriously mark and scrape off each lipid spot into a bunch of separate
test tubes to find out how much phosphorus was in each one. Then you add a
bunch of chemicals, cook them a real long time (you put marbles on the top
so they wouldn't dry out), and let them cool off. If you had done
everything right, you got a blue color that was proportional to the amount
of phosphorus in each little spot -- the more blue, the more phosphorus --
and you read that off with a spectrophotometer.

Each and every time I tested these lipid spots for phosphorus, I also
set up a whole row of test tubes with a known amount of phosphorus in
them, and then subjected them to the same conditions as the samples. I had
to; there was no other way of knowing how much phosphorus was in those
sample tubes otherwise, because too many things affected the assay --
temperature, length of cooking time, proportion of chemicals, and so on. I
ran what is called a controlled experiment, making an effort to be sure
that, if I had made any mistakes, or if the conditions for this experiment
were not the same as the last one I did, at least my standards and
unknowns were treated, to the best of my ability, identically, and I could
legitimately compare them. In order to get an honest answer from the
universe, I had to be honest about how much I didn't know; and, to keep
from fooling myself in to thinking I knew more than I actually did, I did
my best to account for every factor that could conceivably influence my
results by running the standards the same way.

Now, what would happen if the reason why a particular test tube turned
blue wasn't because of the amount of phosphorus in the tube, but because
there was a little demon that popped out of somewhere and made it blue on
a whim? Or because someone aimed a spell at it? Or because the powers of
the universe decided that there had to be a certain amount of blue in the
tube? Would I be able to trust my results? Whether I could trust them or
not would depend on whether or not I could set up an experiment that could
control for such factors. If the demon left some sort of physical
signature, say, a smell of sulfur; or if the spell reliably turned the
silica gel in the affected tube green; or if the tube touched by the
powers of the universe now had a golden glow over it; then I would be able
to either discount the tube or, if the effect were reliable, alter my
results an appropriate amount. Or, if the effect of the demon or spells or
powers were completely random, it would affect the standards as much as
the actual samples, and the way to handle that would be to run the
experiment many more times so the random effects would average out.

However, if there were no way of telling when such a thing happened, if
there were no physical traces other than simply additional blue in a test
tube where it had no business being, then it would impossible to run a
controlled experiment. My phosphorus assay would no longer be affected
only by natural factors I could account for in a properly controlled
experiment, but by uncontrollable supernatural ones. And, if
uncontrollable, unaccountable, and supernatural powers are allowed to
interfere in a non-random way without any measurable trace of their
actions, the postulate of objectivity does not hold. The universe is not
playing fair with us, and science can't work. All attempts at controlled
experimentation become either impossible or pointless.

This means real trouble. And there is only one practical solution. In
order to do science at all, you have to declare that such uncontrollable,
unaccountable powers either do not exist or, if they do exist, they do not
interfere. This is naturalism in its broadest sense, and it is a wild,
crazy, gutsy, and radical idea. While it does not absolutely rule out the
existence of the supernatural, it puts a severe limit on the possible
kinds of powers that can be allowed in a universe in which science has
been found to work.

And, more than that, it's testable. Every scientific experiment tests,
not just the particular physical question you're trying to answer, but all
the steps that have come before -- in the above case, for example, whether
the phospholipid assay works, or the protein assay, or the solvents for
the TLC plate, or whether or not the spectrophotometer was being cranky
that day -- everything. Every part of science hangs together and depends
on every other part.

And there is one assumption that every scientist must make each and
every time he or she does an experiment, one hypothesis that must always
be tested: the postulate of objectivity and, with it, naturalism. Each and
every time anyone goes into a laboratory, they are, in essence, sticking
their necks out and daring any supernatural powers in the universe to
shorten them by a head. So far, our heads are still attached to our necks,
and science works without supernatural intervention.

Now let's look again at statement four. What if the supernatural
power behind the universe is a god who works miracles and listens to
prayers? What if, in the above experiment, god had decided for his
own inscrutable purposes that one of those tubes must miraculously turn
blue even though it contained no phosphorus? Or if, in his infinite
wisdom, he listened to the prayers of one lab tech who realized half-way
through the cooking process that he forgot to put his standards in as a
control and not to another tech who made the same mistake? Or if he
decided to bless the believing scientist with good results and curse the
unbelieving one with bad results?

Obviously, science in this circumstance would be just as impossible and
pointless as in the above examples. And I think you all can see
where this is leading. If we treat number four on this list here the
same way we treated the other three, that is, if we treat the notion of a
god who interferes in human affairs as an hypothesis, it should be obvious
that the continued success of the postulate of objectivity and its
necessary corollary of naturalism should be considered overwhelming
evidence against the existence of any god who causes miracles or listens
to prayer. It is, of course, negative evidence, and subject to
refutation from a sufficiently compelling positive example. But so is the
evidence against ESP, bigfoot, and UFO's with little green pilots.
Every time we have carefully looked into the way the universe works and
assumed it is telling the truth about itself, the truth appears to be that
naturalism holds, and that the supernatural, if it exists, has no
discernible effect on our understanding of it. The postulate of
objectivity has passed every test against it. In fact, it is the
single most-tested hypothesis in all of human history. The
probability that any god or any other supernatural force either exists or
interferes with the world is vanishingly small, and getting smaller.

So, have scientists disproved the existence of god? Not at
all. A god who does nothing, or acts completely randomly, or even
acts according to a carefully coordinated program of deceit, is a god you
can't refute. It's awfully hard to see what use such gods would be,
and they are supremely vulnerable to Ockham's razor, but they could still
exist. And, indeed, there are a few people who have championed each
one of these ideas at one time or another. The deists assumed that
god simply started the universe and thereafter did nothing, leaving it to
run on its own. British physicist Arthur Peacocke currently claims
that god is randomness. And the omphalos argument, which declared
that Adam had a navel, the trees in Eden had rings, and the rivers flowed
along banks they never carved over sedimentary rocks that were never
deposited over time, was popular once too. But most people find such gods
either too limited, disappointing, or ghastly to be believable. Most
people want to believe that "God is in his heaven, and all's right with
the world." They want to believe in a god who acts with a direct
purpose, who listens to prayers, who works miracles, who sends angels to
earth on golden wings. They want to believe in the god who not only
invented nature and everything in it, but who can interfere with it at
will, described by Frederick March in the movie Inherit the Wind:
"Natural law was born in the mind of the heavenly father. He can
change it, cancel it, use it as he pleases. It constantly amazes me
that you apostles of science, for all your supposed wisdom, fail to grasp
that simple fact."

The simple fact that any sort of controlled experiment simply could not
possibly work under such circumstances doesn't bother Frederick March's
character in the movie, and doesn't bother too many other folks
either. Science works when god wants it to, and doesn't work when he
doesn't want it to, and all the commentary on Baysean reasoning and all
the negative evidence from all the scientific experiments ever done in the
world make no difference whatsoever, because for most people god is not
and never has been treated as an hypothesis. The existence of god is
a given, a certain truth with a probability of one. And, as for
science, well, if it's important for the experiment to come out right, a
benevolent god will see that it does so. Besides, god doesn't mess
with little things like test tubes and phosphorus assays, only with big
things like virgin births, raising the dead, turning wives into pillars of
salt, and keeping you alive in the belly of a "great fish." And
faith is not just indifferent to evidence; if the physical evidence
disagrees with a statement of faith, faith must thereby become all the
stronger.

Worse yet, there are plenty of ways of having good, probabilistic
science on the one hand and keeping your god too, a number of which are
currently being promulgated by scientists who ought to know better. We've
already mentioned Arthur Peacocke and his "god is randomness" idea.
You can add to this the example of Stephen Jay Gould and his recent book
Rocks of Ages. All we have to do, Gould insists, is separate the
realm of science and the realm of religion into two "magisteria," separate
but equal realms of power, principalities and proper behavior. The
proper realm of religion is ethics, while the proper realm of science is
everything else, including Gould's beloved snails. But where
does this leave the ethic of truth-telling, the commitment to honesty all
scientists must make in order to do science at all? Is that commitment
part of science, or part of religion? Besides, just about everything
else religion has claimed to be true has been shown to be highly unlikely,
if not out-and-out wrong -- why are we to be forced to accept its
pronouncements on ethics?

Well, all right, let's admit that science works even for ethics.
How about, with Eugenie Scott, we decide to abandon the postulate of
objectivity in favor of what she calls "methodological naturalism" and
assume that, although randomness and the four laws of thermodynamics and
quantum mechanics and everything else science has discovered work fine in
the laboratory, they have nothing to say about the way the world really
is? How about we assume that science works for everything but the
one, ultimate question of whether or not the universe has a purpose?
After all, that sounds like something that's outside the realm of science,
doesn't it? We don't know that the universe is really random, do
we? Shouldn't we allow religion special pleading in this one
case?

Only if we want to assume that the laws that work inside the laboratory
are different than the ones that work outside of it, and that what science
discovers about the world can have no bearing on the nature of that
world. Only if we are willing to allow religion and belief in god
the right not to be treated as an hypothesis. Only if we want to
allow the universe to be a "little bit pregnant" with the
supernatural.

Oh, no. Now we've done it. We're bashing religion.
We're actually saying, not just that statement one through three are
highly likely to be wrong, but that statement four is highly likely to be
wrong as well. And, if you've been paying attention, we've even said
that statement four is even less likely to be true than the other
three.

What we've done does seem pretty foolish. After all, how dare we
treat god as an hypothesis? How dare we challenge the claims of
religion? How dare we take this idea of the ultimate and ask it to
pass the same tests of evidence as everything else? All the
objections to accepting the postulate of objectivity eventually boil down
to the shocked question "How dare you?"

We dare because we don't have any other choice, not and remain honest
with ourselves. As skeptics, as scientists, we can't assume from the
start that god has a probability of one (or a probability of zero, for
that matter). As skeptics, as scientists, we have to recognize the
fact that all supernaturally-based religions and gods are profoundly
pseudoscientific, and violate every one of the four laws of
thermodynamics. The desire for the universe to be guided by
providence instead of randomness; to be blessed by miracles instead of
coincidence; to be privy to knowledge gathered without effort through
revelation instead of being limited to uncertainty; to escape, once and
for all, into heaven, instead of being forever circumscribed by the
limitations of the natural world; can not be fulfilled in a universe where
the four laws of thermodynamics hold.

If pointing out that the postulate of objectivity is highly likely to
be true and the god-hypothesis is highly likely to be either false or
irrelevant is bashing religion, then so be it. (In our opinion,
simply telling the truth about religion is bashing it enough.) But
if it makes any of you folks feel better, we're pretty sure that what we
have to say here will not disturb anyone's religious beliefs in any
way. Neither faith in god nor religious belief depend on evidence,
whether negative or otherwise. If people are capable of insisting
that James Randi actually has to be using psychic powers to bend
silverware, even though he claims to be using simple trickery, then they
are certainly capable of believing in a god who listens to prayers and
works miracles in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Statement
four is never treated the same way as the other three, not by believers
and, unfortunately, not by most skeptics, either. It is always taken
as a special case, a necessary exception, to all the rules that govern the
rest of reality. And as long as god is never taken as a testable
hypothesis, as long as there are people who, like Stephen Jay Gould and
Eugenie Scott, declare that religion deserves the right to special
pleading, nothing Norm and I have to say here will have any effect
whatsoever. God is quite safe from our puny attacks.

So why do we bother? Because there is another, deeper, more
personal and even emotional reason why we dare. It seems to us that
the two things that are necessary to make life meaningful for human beings
are love and purpose. Someone else once said the two most meaningful
things are love and work, but we don't think he meant work in the sense of
being a wage slave; purposeless work is sheer torture. We think he
meant work in the sense of having something worthwhile to do; that is, to
work for a purpose that you value.

But as long as human beings continue to be told that love and purpose
are not to be found in the natural world, and must be found in the
supernatural, then both pseudoscience and religion will persist.
Think about it. The guy who has been abducted by aliens 100 times
has what he considers a very meaningful life. True, he has confused
some rather unpleasant attention on the part of the supposed aliens with
love, and going on talk shows with a worthwhile purpose, but there you
have it. He considers the skeptical alternative worthless because he
finds no meaning in it, because it leaves him feeling unnoticed and
purposeless.

And it is the same with religion. Religion tells us that life
without god is meaningless: that god is love, and our only purpose
is to worship him. The real world, we are told, is worthless in and
of itself.

And as long as only god's love is valued, human love will mean
nothing. As long as the only purpose human beings are allowed to
have is to worship god, then human purposes will have no meaning.
Living in this world in the here and now; loving those people and
creatures who are in it for themselves; and trying to understand the world
honestly, on its own terms, will have no value. Religion and the
supernatural are a classic bait-and-switch scheme. You go to them,
trying to find the answer to life, and you are told that life is not the
answer. And we feel this is a tragedy.

We do not intend to devalue the meaning religion gives to people's
lives. The need for love and purpose seem to be vital for both human
survival and human dignity, and to denigrate that need is cruel and
dishonest. But we do feel constrained to point out that this need is
so strong that people are quite capable of believing in the impossible to
fill that need. Human beings are just monkeys, after all, staring
out into a world of sometimes terrifying darkness. And love and
purpose are sometimes difficult to come by.

If all of the above is true, it would seem that the evidence of science
leads inevitably to atheism. Atheism, as we all know, is perceived
by this society as the worst possible kind of evil. If that is the
case, why is science tolerated?

It is tolerated for three reasons. First, because people are
profoundly ignorant of even the findings of science, let alone the deeper
assumptions that allow science to work. Second, because faith is not
dependent on evidence. And third, because what people see of science
is not the living, breathing process of testing the postulate of
objectivity, of the ethic of truth-telling, of the scientific method, but
only the findings themselves, the dead remains, body parts that are bought
and sold on the open market. Humanity delights in what Jacob
Bronowski called "selling the corpse of science." Most people don't
care how the latest technological innovations got here; they just want the
goodies, and never mind where they came from. How else are you to
explain the surreal comments of mothers who demand fertility treatments,
based on the most extraordinarily advanced scientific technology the world
has to offer, and then call the resulting litter of often desperately ill
babies "a gift from god?" Using science this way has "all the
virtues of theft over honest toil" (one of Paul Churchland's favorite
phrases, though we don't know if he would support its use in this
context). It isn't that scientists are being robbed blind, although
they are; the real tragedy is that humanity is being robbed of the
opportunity to understand why scientists have had to become
atheists.

There have been attempts by a number of scientists, heroic ones in
fact, to change this deplorable situation. Bill Nye, James Randi,
Richard Dawkins, and most especially Carl Sagan have worked tirelessly to
bring science to the attention of the public, to encourage critical
thinking, to replace the "wonder" of religion with the "wonder" of
science. But the terrible thing, the tragic and heartbreaking
reality, is that most people don't want to know the truth that science has
revealed as being highly probable. They want the comforting lies;
they want the delightful fantasies; they want the mysteries; they want
the pseudoscience. All people ever see of science is the special
effects -- and all people ever want to see of science is the special
effects. The truth is simply too inconvenient.

So why is science tolerated? Because it is confused with
magic. It's amazing to Norm and me how much of science has been put
in the service of satisfying people's fantasies and fairy-tale
desires. We have seven league boots and flying carpets -- although
we call them planes, trains, and automobiles. We have magic swords
and arrows that instantly kill anything they touch -- only we call them
AK-47's, nuclear weapons, and ICBM's. We have crystal balls -- only
we call them telephones and televisions. We have mystic oracles that
contain all the knowledge and wisdom of the ages -- only we call them
computers and the internet. We have palaces filled with opulence and
magical devices -- only we call them cottages on the La Jolla
bluffs.

But science is not magic, and never will be. The technological
goodies of science, the only part of science with which most people have
any contact, is almost entirely peripheral to the enterprise of
science. The purpose of science is to tell the truth about the way
the world is, not fulfill people's fairy-tale desires. There is a
lovely example in the movie Volcano that illustrates this situation
perfectly. The lava is pouring down the streets of LA, and of course
all the shops are being looted -- hooray, free goodies! The lady
scientist goes to a sporting goods store and helps herself to a
basketball. A basketball? When she could be picking up a VCR
or a home stereo system just down the street? Yes, a basketball --
because she uses that basketball to find out the slope of the street to
tell which way the lava is going to flow next.

As long as human beings want fairy tales to come true, science will
fail to measure up. And that will cause discontent. The latest
rumblings of that discontent can be heard in the disaffections of both the
political left and right, in both postmodernism and the resurgence of
fundamentalist religions. But in truth that discontent has never
left us. And it's only going to get worse. At the moment,
people are sufficiently distracted by all the entertainments available to
them, from presidential scandals, school children murdering each other,
the implosion of Yugoslavia, and the latest scores from the football game,
distracted enough that the limitations of science and the real-world
consequences of technology can be ignored or forgotten. But at some
point it's going to become clear that people can't have everything they
want. At some point the consequences of people's fairy-tale desires
are going to catch up with them. At some point scientists are going
to run out of magic spells and wonders, because creating those spells and
wonders is not and never has been the purpose of science.

So what's going to happen when the spells run out? When people
realize that giving them ever and ever more toys to play with, ever and
ever more stuff, ever and ever more power, is not the purpose of
science? When you tell people that their seven-league boots and
flying carpets, their magic swords, their crystal balls, their mystic
oracles, their kingships and palaces, have real-world limitations and
real-world consequences for their use? In the real world, fairy
tales come with a price tag. What happens when the bill comes
due?

First, there will be massive denial that there's even a bill to be
paid. The opinion piece we have handed out by Joseph Perkins is a
perfect example. Magic is not supposed to be explainable, or cause
pollution, or use up or destroy irreplaceable resources, or be limited by
physics, the laws of thermodynamics, or information theory. So of
course there shouldn't be any problem.

Then, when scientists tell people the truth, as they must, and people
realize there is a bill after all, after they get over the sticker shock
all those folks who have misunderstood the purpose of science all along
will feel betrayed and angry. They'll get annoyed, and after they
get annoyed, they'll sue. Scientists are supposed to be wizards and
fairy godmothers, after all, not make mistakes or have limitations.
If science doesn't work the way people want it to, then it is the fault of
science, and, by golly, they'll sue! And this is already
happening. Corporations are already being sued simply for being
fallible. In fact, they're being sued even though the scientific
evidence in the case is in direct opposition to the claim of the
suit. There is absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever that
breast implants have any deleterious health effects at all -- and yet Dow
Corning, faced with the prospect of endless litigation on an issue with no
scientific merit, was forced to settle the suit for hundreds of thousands
of dollars. The people suing Dow Corning were annoyed at the fact
that the science didn't agree with what they believed -- and, rather than
acquiesce to the science, rather than admit to the limitations of reality,
they punished the company.

After they find out suing science doesn't work, they'll go looking for
better magic, and plunge even deeper into pseudoscience and
religion. People are already tremendously dissatisfied with the
limitations of medicine, and now half the shelves in your local drugstore
are devoted to homeopathic and herbal remedies (and it's even worse
in Europe). We suspect that it will only get worse the more and more
science is found to be limited to reality, not people's fantasies and
fairy tale notions of the way the world ought to be.

Of course, if people ever get really annoyed, all the scientists in the
world are going to be lined up against the wall and shot -- because, after
all, it's their fault they couldn't deliver the goods.

It seems at this point that, faced with this sobering situation, the
best thing scientists can do is to shut up and keep quiet about their
atheism. And almost all of them do. It seems a far better,
humbler, and not to mention safer course to follow the lead of Stephen Jay
Gould and Eugenie Scott, to cloak the wolf of science in the lambskin of
religion, to make it appear harmless, to take the politic and safe way
out, to not rock the boat, to carefully and delicately question only the
edges of the supernatural, the simple pseudoscientific claims of
spoon-bending and dowsing, and leave the far deeper pseudoscience of
religion alone.

And Norm and I have some sympathy for this viewpoint. We would be
fools to underestimate our adversary. To challenge religion is
impossible in most parts of the world, fatal in many others, and seriously
dangerous just about everywhere else. The only reason Norm and I are
getting away with it now is because we're among friends, and because
neither one of us has any real social standing in the world outside this
little room. We're not famous, and no one really pays any attention
to us. I'm just a housewife, and Norm's just an oceanographer.
What do we know about the mysteries of religion?

But if we follow this safe road, we are being nothing but dupes of an
ancient, grasping, greedy and deadly power that wants, supremely, to be
declared right, at whatever cost. That power is ignoring us for the
moment. But we had better not fool ourselves as to its central
intent, which is to squash all dissent and freethought in favor of wishful
thinking. The Catholic Church fights for rights of the poor and
oppressed to become good believing Catholics, not questioning atheists or
fearless scientists. Protestant religions are fighting against new
age and other pseudoscientific beliefs because they see those views as
competition, not because they value critical thinking or atheist
thought. The only reason why communism was atheistic was because, as
a new religion, as the revealed word according to Karl Marx, it was forced
to distinguish itself in some way from all the others, not because it
valued science -- quite obviously the reverse, as the Lamarkian debacle
shows. And it has all been done with the best of intentions and the
most noble of motives -- which, sadly, is where most serious evil is to be
found.

We are living in a golden age. And one of the worst symptoms of
all golden ages seems to be that those living in them believe they will go
on forever. But it isn't possible. Eventually the fairy tale
has to end. To give everyone in the world the equivalent of even our
family's modest little home in Clairemont, much less the castles and
palaces they believe they really want, would pave half the planet over and
turn the rest to agriculture. And at some point we are going to run
out of energy and resources. Worse, we are making at most diffident
efforts at dealing with the problem, precisely because, thanks to
technology, we aren't running out of resources quite fast enough for
people to notice. There used to be someone studying fusion research
at UCSD. There isn't anymore. We have enough oil to last the
next hundred years, after all, and enough coal to last a millennium.
Every one of us in this room will be dead by then. Why should we
bother with all the expense and effort of finding an alternative fuel
source? Never mind that, by the time all that oil is burned, the
signs of global warming will no longer be subtle indications that people
like Joseph Perkins can ignore, but a severe and deadly reality.
People don't want the fairy-tale to end. Far from showing any signs
of facing up to the limitations of what the postulate of objectivity, the
ethic of truth-telling, and naturalism tell us about the world, people are
showing signs of running even deeper into comfortable fantasies.

So why tell the truth about science? Why annoy people by telling
them that their belief in a god that violates all the laws of
thermodynamics is highly likely to be untrue? Haven't we got enough
problems already? If we don't tell the truth now, when will we
tell it? If we don't tell what we have learned here, now, in the
only place, the only time, in the history of the world it has been
possible to tell it, when and where should we do it? Do you want to
tell truth in the middle of a golden age, when science is still the most
respected profession on the planet, when people might actually have the
time and inclination to consider it, and even, just possibly, get used to
the idea? Or do you want to try to explain it when you've been lined
up against the wall and they're putting the blindfold on you?

The human race will ultimately survive only if the limitations to all
human knowledge are understood and accepted. And we feel it is
easier to tell the truth, the whole truth, before mankind's belief in
magic, god, and the supernatural, coupled with the power of technology,
leads to horrible disaster. The phrase "godless science" must cease
being an epithet and instead become a simple, even redundant, statement of
fact. And we, as skeptics, as scientists, as atheists, must stop
feeling ashamed about expressing and supporting the most tested hypothesis
in all of human experience.

We would like to end this talk with a quote from Jacob Bronowski's
Ascent of Man, in the chapter "Knowledge or Certainty."

It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into
numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for
yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at
Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into
this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people.
And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was
done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe
that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how
they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of
gods.

As long as belief in god is allowed to be treated not as hypothesis,
but as a certainty exempt from criticism, as long as religion is the one
area of human thought allowed to be exempt from the laws of physics, as
long as ethical systems are allowed to ignore the highly probable
limitations of the postulate of objectivity, this is how human beings will
continue to behave. We have the responsibility, the duty, and the
right to challenge arrogance, dogma, and ignorance. Go now, and tell
the truth!